Fire and Brimstone

A punisher card from the era when white was allowed to be vindictive in ways that cost the caster too. The design is a retaliation valve: it can only point at a player who attacked this turn, so it functions as a counterpunch against aggression rather than a proactive burn spell. The targeting restriction is broader than it first looks, since the attacker need not have come for you: a player counts as having attacked the moment they declare attackers, whether they swung at you, a third player, or a planeswalker, and because this is an instant you can fire it back during that same combat phase rather than waiting for the dust to settle. The symmetry is the discipline holding it together: four to them, four to you, every time, no rider that lets you skew the math. That self-damage clause is what keeps a five-mana white instant from being a clean point-the-opponent-to-death button; you buy the burst by mortgaging your own life total, which is a strange place to find white, the color that usually gains life rather than spends it. It belongs to the old school of conditional, symmetrical, slightly self-defeating effects that early sets used to police power before the design team trusted itself to print cheaper, cleaner answers. As a measure of how white once expressed punishment, it reads less like a tool and more like a verdict: attack, and you both pay.